APIs are the backbone of digital transformation. Via APIs, you can securely share data and functionality with developers both inside and outside of your organizational boundaries, letting you build applications faster, seamlessly connect and interact with partners, and drive new business revenue. 

Because APIs encompass business-critical information, any downtime or performance degradation can lead to significant loss in revenue, customers, and brand value. Therefore, there’s mounting pressure on operations teams to ensure that APIs are always available and performing as expected. If the APIs go down, so too do the services that fuel customer experiences and on which the organization relies for collaboration and business processes.

However, as you build and scale your API programs, it becomes practically impossible for API operators to manually monitor and manage all your APIs. To help, we brought the power of industry-leading AI and ML technologies to API operations via Apigee X, a major release of our API management platform. Apigee X seamlessly weaves together Google Cloud’s expertise in AI, security and networking to help you efficiently build and manage APIs at scale. 

Put your API data into action

Apigee applies machine learning to your API metadata and provides you the required tools that simplify various aspects of API operations. A great example of AI for APIs is anomaly detection: 

• AI-powered rules trigger alerts based on a set of predefined conditions that are determined by applying Google’s industry-leading machine learning models to your historical API data.
• Auto-thresholds adjust the monitoring criteria of your APIs and set them to pattern-based values. 
• Reduce overhead results because operators don’t have to manually monitor anomalies or adjust the monitoring thresholds on APIs.

“By applying AI and ML models to our historical API data, these advanced features are able to alert us about scenarios we haven’t thought of. Such automation capabilities significantly reduce our upfront efforts. And from a security perspective, the actionable insights help us ensure that our proxies are exposed only over secure HTTPs ports and adhere to compliance requirements. We’re also able to closely monitor user activity and quickly pull out reports during audits.” – Adam Brancato, Sr. Manager, Global Technology and Security at Citrix

As our customers scale their API programs, they find it extremely useful to harness AI-powered capabilities.  In our recent State of the API Economy 2021 report, we found a 230% increase in enterprises’ use of anomaly detection, bot protection, and security analytics features.

To learn more about Apigee X, and see AI and machine learning in action, check out this video, and to try Apigee X for free, click here.

Google Cloud Results

• Replaced conflicting, time-consuming paper logs with a near real-time, transparent app
• Scaled rapidly and easily to accommodate new teams thanks to Google App Engine
• Enables photographic and video communication to replace confusing text
• New factory solution rolled out in just 15 days

In 1877, Pietro Barilla set up a small bakery to make pasta and baked goods for the people of Parma, Italy. Today, Barilla applies its 140 years of baking knowledge on a global scale, with six major manufacturing sites in Italy and an international network employing over 8,000 people. As the world’s leading producer of pasta, Barilla knows that when it comes to making quality food, great communication is key. That’s why the company plans to become a completely digital, looking to technology to improve the way it works.

Teams at the Barilla factory in Cremona work along a production line more than one-kilometer long, staffed by three shifts of workers a day. When one shift handed over to the next or requested machine maintenance teams, they used paper notebooks and unofficial instant messaging to communicate. That meant there was no authoritative, real-time record of events, communication was messy, oversight was poor, and teams had to hold daily morning meetings to synchronise notes.

Barilla worked with the Google Cloud Partner Injenia to create a solution, beginning with a consultative process on the factory floor.

“We had the idea to to start from the bottom and work up,” says Cristiano Boscato at Injenia. “Barilla’s top staff were brilliant about letting us do it. Eight of us from Injenia spent months on the factory lines with Barilla workers, collecting ideas on Google Docs, making presentations with Slides and collecting feedback with Forms. The CollaborAction app we created is the result of an amazing partnership.”

Co-designing a team social network

“Everything at the Cremona plant was managed offline, with paper,” explains Alessandra Ardrizzoia, Digital Engagement Senior Manager at Barilla. “Workers on the line would track events in notebooks, the shift leader would have another notebook, and the leader of the maintenance team would have yet another notebook. Everybody wrote their own text description of events, so there would be mismatches in the information going around.”

To resolve this, teams would meet at 8:30am every day to reconstruct a consistent narrative. In addition, machine maintenance workers were already using instant messaging to communicate with the line. Barilla and Injenia looked for a solution that could deliver a searchable, single version of events, with the ease of use of a mobile messaging application.

After consulting factory workers for ideas, Injenia created CollaborAction, a custom-built app that brought G Suite collaboration tools together on an Google App Engine platform, using Google Cloud SQL to index files. Google+, Google Drive and Hangouts were not only highly available and easy-to-use, they also “helped with fast adoption, with interfaces that workers could already relate to.” Meanwhile Google App Engine enabled the Injenia team to deliver updates and new versions at speed, as part of a feedback process with workers who offered suggestions through a link to Forms embedded in the app.

Google+ provides an intuitive social media dashboard that workers felt comfortable with. Now teams use company tablets placed at intervals along the line to log in, report issues to other teams, photograph problems, schedule maintenance, give status updates through Hangouts chat, and have visibility on the whole process as it takes place.

“Everyone in the Cremona plant was really happy with the new social collaboration process. Because they were involved in designing the solution, they felt involved and really engaged with the process,” says Alessandra. “And now that everyone is aligned with CollaborAction, all the work in the plant is more effective. They are more agile and can use their time in more added-value activities.”

Optimization and a national roll-out

Created in Cremona, now CollaborAction connects over 1,000 users in six of Barilla’s factories in Italy. “The pilot at Cremona took one month, and adoption has been easier and faster in every plant we’ve taken it to,” says Cristiano. “We have another five or six plants more, and it takes no more than 15 days to introduce. That’s incredible.”

Because CollaborAction is a mobile app built on Google App Engine, scaling to meet new demand has been simple. Now maintenance teams use the app on smartphones, line workers use it on tablets, and shift leaders use it on laptops, so the entire team is aligned in close to real-time on a single version of events. And now teams communicate with video and photographs as well as text, there’s less room for confusion, as Alessandra explains. “It’s no problem understanding what’s happening in a video or picture, compared to a message that just says ‘something is going wrong.’ On a production line, where one part leads into the next, that speed makes a difference, and means we don’t have to throw as much food away when something breaks down.”

“Now we’re collecting feedback from all of the plants using CollaborAction and using it to create a standardised solution that we can apply across all of our plants,” says Alessandra. “We’re side-by-side with the workers in that sense, trying to address their needs with new features. It’s a way to make the workers feel like part of the solution, and that the app represents their needs and their voice.”

Solving a universal problem

By the end of 2018, Barilla and Injenia aim to have deployed CollaborAction to 2,700 employees at 18 factories worldwide. Barilla has already collected more than 50,000 posts with the app, including around 20,000 photographs and videos, and is now considering ways to apply Cloud Machine Learning Engine to create a maintenance chatbot or direct IoT connection with machinery.

“CollaborAction hasn’t just made our maintenance processes faster and more efficient, its also exponentially increased the knowledge and understanding employees have about their work,” says Alessandra. “It’s improving team spirit, too, such as when employees use CollaborAction to arrange to play soccer. It’s become the main communication tool for the entire plant.”

Permodalan Nasional Berhad (PNB) is one of Malaysia’s largest investment institutions with more than RM300 billion ($71 milion) in assets under management. Through our wholly-owned company, Amanah Saham Nasional Berhad (ASNB), we manage 14 funds with a total value of RM235.74 billion ($56.34 million) as of Dec. 31, 2018. 

To expand the range of people who can invest and participate in the economy, our unit trust funds enable the public to invest as little as RM10 ($2.50) into any of our funds. With each investment, unit-holders (a unit-holder is an investor who holds securities of trust) are able to participate in the local and international investment activities managed by PNB and ASNB. They also gain dividends from their investment at the end of the financial year for the funds that they invest in. 

Accelerating access to services with APIs
As chief technology officer for PNB, I lead the retail and asset management technology aspects of the business. My team and I manage the basic IT systems such as email and networks, but also the more exciting and complex IT infrastructures, including investment core systems and data analytics for the unit trust teams.  

In January 2017 (prior to joining PNB), I observed unit holders waiting in a long line just to update their account balances following a dividend announcement. Unit-holders had limited options then: they were required to visit an ASNB branch or one of our agent banks to complete the transaction. When PNB hired me three months later, I was determined to create a self-service balance checker that would reduce our unit-holders’ waiting time. My team first built an application on an Android tablet that communicated to our backend via APIs. Then we constructed a kiosk around this and started our first self-service kiosk. We have built 120 kiosks across Malaysia in six months.

While we made progress in creating new solutions for our unit-holders, we were missing an API management framework to manage our APIs. After extensive market research, we decided on the Apigee API management platform as it was the most suitable platform to build our capabilities for developing and managing APIs. Apigee’s technical capabilities coupled with responsive support from Google Cloud were important factors. Being new to APIs, we value the quick and ready technical support made available to us.  In addition, the secure and flexible system that Apigee offers is critical to us because as a financial institution, security is of paramount importance.

In July 2017, we migrated our retail core system from mainframe base to a modern, cloud-based infrastructure. In August of the same year, a newly developed web portal provided our unit-holders access to their accounts through their mobile devices for the first time. The customer response was very encouraging and uptake has been very high since then. 

The portal uses APIs to enable our 14 million unit-holders to check balances, reinvest, edit their personal information, and access account statements. For now, the portal is only available to unit-holders who pre-register via an in-person onboarding process. We are currently awaiting regulatory direction on electronic Know Your Customer (eKYC) rules that will impact digital onboarding before we can enable access to new unit-holders via their mobile devices.

Creating new channels for financial inclusion
To date, our web portal and APIs have generated approximately RM2 billion (USD500 million) in annual investments. This equates to about five percent of our total yearly investments contributed via the digital platform. While this is encouraging progress, there is much more potential that we can tap into, including the collection and analysis of consumer behavior data. Moving forward, this valuable information will provide insights for us to improve customer experience and fine-tune our offerings. 

A typical bank integration typically takes six months at a high cost. Excluding the governance and compliance approval period, our key APIs can be consumed in under three months, at minimal cost. Banks that use APIs will find ours easy to work with. This simplifies our agent onboarding process. 

APIs enable us to innovate further by expanding our capabilities and reach. We are currently onboarding a few PNB agent banks and we look forward to the possibility to connect to fintech players in Malaysia, especially e-wallet solution providers. API simplify the communications between multiple systems and offer a world of possibilities for our business.